As computers become faster and more capable, applications and processes associated therewith are often designed with little regard for the capabilities of the computer on which they will ultimately run. A computer program released today may very well be installed and run tomorrow on a computer manufactured three years ago. As technology advances at an exponential rate, a state-of-the-art computer manufactured three years ago is obsolete by present day standards. Thus, modern applications often are subject to the limitations of a central processing unit (CPU) that was designed years ago, such that the modern application consumes most, if not all, of the CPU resources in order to run. When this occurs, other programs that require a response from the CPU can be ignored.
If a CPU does attempt to respond to other programs requesting attention, it must do so by stealing resources from still other programs or processes, which in turn, submit further requests from the CPU. For example, if a thread in process1 is occupying CPU resourceX and a thread in process2 is occupying resourceY, and then a thread in process1 requests resourceY from the CPU, the CPU cannot provide resourceY until the thread in process2 releases it. If a thread in process2 then requests resourceX, a thread deadlock condition occurs, wherein neither process will release the resource it possesses until it receives the requested resource, which it cannot receive until released by the other process. Such a condition is also known as “thrashing,” and is typically perceived by a user as painfully slow, or even frozen, computer progress. As users demand more and more from computers, such processing delays can be terribly frustrating and can substantially diminish a user's computing experience.
In an age where nanoseconds count, conventional methods and systems that attempt to enhance CPU resource management can be unnecessarily time-consuming and superfluous, and, therefore, tedious and inefficient. Thus, there is an unmet need in the art for systems and methods that minimize the number of actions and/or amount of time required to efficiently manage CPU resources.